Forty U-M students start new year as Dow Sustainability Fellows

Forty U-M students start new year as Dow Sustainability Fellows

Forty sustainability-minded master's and professional-degree students from eight U-M schools and colleges recently started the 2014 Dow Sustainability Fellows program, through which they each receive $20,000 for their studies and become part of a collaborative community of scholars focused on sustainability.

"We're happy to see this diverse group of students accepted into the Dow Sustainability Fellows program," says Don Scavia, director of the Graham Sustainability Institute, which administers the program on the university's behalf. "The best ideas and solutions come when diverse perspectives are brought together, and that's what this interdisciplinary fellowship is all about."

The new fellows were selected from a distinguished group of 72 nominees (each U-M school or college could nominate up to 10 candidates) and mark the second cohort of Dow Sustainability Master's Fellows at the university. They will be with the program from January to December 2014. The new fellows and their nominating schools are:

Established through a six-year expendable gift from the Dow Chemical Co., the Dow Sustainability Fellows program supports full-time U-M graduate students and postdoctoral scholars who are committed to finding interdisciplinary, actionable, and meaningful sustainability solutions on local-to-global scales.

To foster high-impact collaborations across the university, the fellows program also includes a distinguished awards competition for applied sustainability projects that cut across disciplines and academic levels.